Wasn't much of a road of course; muddy and impassable in places for decades. Little more than a cow trail, the road eventually became an arterial in Surrey. Along its eastern stretch were situated sawmills, general stores, stump farms, and even a puffed wheat factory. Most of this yielded to quiet family homes on lots of a few wooded acres by the 1950s. And then, in 1966, Guildford Mall, a creature born of the freeway, came to be located at the Hjorth Road's intersection with Johnston Road. Nothing was ever the same again.

The road itself, freshly branded 104th Avenue, was now a link between the old highway town centre of Whalley and the suburban mall Guildford. Ever since the mall's creation, city planners have been busy dreaming up a vast commercial strip and city centre which, they assume, must eventually encompass the wide gulf between these centres.
Concurrently though, it must be seen by city officials from time to time as an annoying gulf; too wide to fill in quickly with commercial development but not wide enough to buffer with parks. A sort of "no man's land" of urban discontinuity.
Now abandoned houses and vestiges of old acreage greenspaces sit beside glossy, glassy new commercial parks which are empty.
What to do with this space?

Meanwhile, west of Whalley, the Hjorth Road plunges to the flats of South Westminster; yielding to larger homes with views and then tapering into piles of dirt, lumber and cars.
I had long been planning on walking the length of 104th Avenue, visually documenting what I saw. Several months ago I finally had the chance.
Perhaps there is no road that better represents the uncertain urbanity that is the northern half of Surrey than the Hjorth Road.